Reply to post:

If the rights were balanced by allowing the police to scan for their normal rouges gallery and nick them to keep peaceful protests peaceful, but didn't attempt to identify people and didn't retain the footage, I can't see too many objections personally.

And there, in one sentence, I think you sup up the issue.

Like most people, I accept that the police need to have certain powers, and sometimes those powers might inconvenience me what going about my business as a law abiding citizen. However, I expect those powers to be of a scale appropriate to the task, and used in the most limited way possible.

If we had, using old-school tech, checkpoints at all entries to [somethings], and police there with "papieren bitte" making lists of all who attended - and known to be keeping those lists, and cross referencing them with all other information they hold, "forever" - then people would be "not very happy with it".

But here we are, the police have this new tech and it appears are operating on the "we can do it, therefore we should do it" - thus keeping those lists, with much lower accuracy and hence opportunity for innocent people to be categorised as offenders, in a much less overt way.

There is an argument in favour of AFR - but only if the checks and balances and restrictions are in place. The very first limitation should be that the lists of people should not be allowed to be kept. The second should be that any positive matches thrown up by the system must be reviewed by a person and all rejected records deleted.

But at present, there is effectively no oversight, no rules, no limits on what the (by all accounts, very inaccurate) information may be used for and how long it may be kept. Thus the means for long term mass tracking AND PROFILING of large numbers of the population without their knowledge or consent. As mentioned above, it's not that dissimilar to the police having found a way to covertly take fingerprints of everyone passing a checkpoint - and collecting that information with no oversight or rules. The only mitigating factor at the moment is that the information is of limited use to them due to the carp accuracy of the system - so far.